'This essay considers the divide between two camps of critics responding to the use and potential abuse of a white woman narrator in J. M. Coetzee's Foe (1986) and finds within the novel a critique of contemporaneous feminist discourses. I identify a rhetoric of rape deployed by the novel's protagonist, Susan, against the mute ex-slave, Friday, and consider its effect on Susan's ability to mediate between oppressed and dominant groups, represented by Friday and the author—(De)Foe—respectively. Ultimately, I argue that Susan's curiously masculine sense of desire complicates the charge that Coetzee is simply appropriating the voice of a woman, finding instead that he utilises Susan's attempted penetration into Friday's silence to demonstrate the faults of a second-wave feminism that exploits various categories of otherness.' (Publication abstract)
